Monkey Island Special Editions coming to stores (in Europe)

Activision has announced that it's set to publish the Monkey Island Special Edition Collection for release later this year, bundling The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition and Monkey Island 2 Special Edition: LeChuck's Revenge into one neat package with additional bonus content from the Lucasarts vault.

Both games will be available in their entirety on the retail disc, with remastered HD graphics, the remastered score, full voiceover and a hints system to help you out should you get stuck. And yes, you'll still be able to seamlessly switch between the classic and HD versions of the game at the touch of a button, and you'll still get the commentary from creators Tim Schafer, Ron Gilbert and Dave Grossman on Monkey Island 2.

Both full games will come with new, newver-before-seen bonus content on the disc too, including environment and character concept art from the Special Editions and the original and re-recorded soundtracks. There'll also be storyboards and concept art from an Industrial Light & Magic animated Monkey Island movie that never saw the light of day.

Monkey Island Special Edition Collection will be flying the Jolly Roger and setting sail to retail stores on September 9th, 2011. If you can't wait that long though, you could always download the games from the Xbox Live Arcade for 800 Microsoft Points each.

I'm wondering if these'll be any different from the downloadable versions. As it's a mainstream retail release I would've thought they'll polish the games up and include some updates to the graphical mistakes and glitches, but I've got a nagging suspicion they'll just chuck them on the disc as they are...